How FOAM is revolutionizing medical education - Healthy Debate

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-05-12

Summary:

"...FOAM, or FOAMed: free open access medical education. The term refers to any free educational material about medicine on the Internet, and includes thousands of online resources: blogs, podcasts, videos—even Wikipedia might count as FOAM. It allows anyone to publicly weigh in on new research or share their clinical wisdom, and makes reams of information available to an audience that may never have otherwise had access to it. To some extent, FOAM is disrupting the nature and hierarchy of medical education, a change that people find both exciting and worrisome.

And then there was FOAM

The name FOAM was coined at the International Conference for Emergency Medicine in 2012, when a small group of like-minded doctors—including Mike Cadogan, (founder (in 2007) of the Australia-based EM website “Life in the Fast Lane” (LITFL)—found themselves commiserating about the “negative connotations of the term ‘Social Media’ in the laggardly minds of practicing physicians.” Cadogan later wrote that because the venue for the ICME conference was Dublin, “the answer was naturally to be found at the bottom of a pint of Guinness.” That’s where the acronym FOAM “bubbled into existence,” Cadogan wrote. Emergency doctors were among the earliest adopters and producers of FOAM, and Thoma credits Cadogan in particular with helping to nurture a community among them. Teresa Chan, assistant professor in emergency medicine at McMaster and Thoma’s co-editor at CanadiEM, also thinks demographics played a part in how FOAM developed. “For various reasons, emergency medicine has decided this is their jam,” she says. “We’re a younger specialty, we’re a newer specialty. We have probably more millennial physicians than most other specialties because the need has just sprung up in the last two decades.” But FOAM is not the exclusive domain of emergency doctors. There are educational blogs and podcasts in many other specialties, and several that deal with more general questions—The Rounds Table on this website is one example—though they may not always formally call themselves FOAM....

One of the most touted advantages of FOAM is its ability to tighten the “knowledge translation gap” in medicine, which refers to the time it takes for research to be adopted in clinical practice. An oft-cited study from 2011 found that, on average, that gap is 17 years. The process, says Thoma, involves “taking new information, figuring out where it fits in the literature, and figuring out whether it should change practice.”..."

Link:

http://healthydebate.ca/2018/05/topic/foam-medical-education

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.oer oa.education oa.students oa.authors oa.crowd oa.social_media oa.scholcomm oa.trends oa.quality oa.gratis oa.speed oa.publishing oa.canada oa.medicine

Date tagged:

05/12/2018, 16:44

Date published:

05/12/2018, 12:44